Weekend picks for book lovers

Dec. 15, 2012
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'38 Nooses' by Scott W. Berg

by USA TODAY, USA TODAY

by USA TODAY, USA TODAY

What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY's picks for book lovers include a non-fiction look at Abraham Lincoln and the Indian Wars, and the latest Oprah Book Club 2.0 selection.

38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier's End by Scott W. Berg; Pantheon, 309 pp.; non-fiction

Abe Lincoln may be a big hit at the movies at the moment, but rarely a month goes by, it seems, without a book about the 16th president. Here's a new volume that focuses on a little-known crisis in his presidency.

The last thing on Lincoln's mind in 1862, as his armies bore the bloody brunt of the Civil War, was the tension mounting in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory between white settlers, Native Americans and a distant government.

But as documented in 38 Nooses, America's original victims of white oppression - the many Indian tribes who were being pushed, brutally and inexorably, from their lands to the margins of Manifest Destiny - would make a tragic claim on Lincoln's attention.

An uprising of Dakota warriors, impoverished by decades of broken treaties, spurred six weeks of fearful conflict along the Minnesota frontier in 1862, before federal troops overwhelmed them, a military commission sentenced 300 of them to die and Lincoln granted clemency to all but 38.

USA TODAY says *** Â½ out of four. Berg "crafts a heady narrative from his extensive research â?¦an impressive new history."

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis; Knopf, 243 pp.; fiction

This debut novel, the latest pick for Oprah's relaunched book club, uses the lives of one African-American woman and her children to illuminate "The Great Migration" of Southern blacks to the North.

USA TODAY says ***. "Mathis writes with power and insightâ?¦ more accessible than Toni Morrison."

A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts by Sebastian Faulks; Henry Holt, 287 pp.; fiction

Five lengthy linked stories, whose characters include a British schoolmaster changed by his service during World War II, and an enigmatic young female singer-songwriter in the 1970s, from the author of Birdsong.